It has become a cliché among the punditocracy observing this year’s presidential contest that voter interest and turnout will be minimal because the nation, once again in a period of "peace and prosperity," faces no serious problems. No "overriding issue" stands out.

What is interesting about this cliché is that this has been the media message in every presidential race of the last twenty years. A possible exception is the election of 1992, when the Clinton campaign’s slogan of "It’s the economy, stupid" was such a compelling sound bite that it nearly drowned out the pundits’ obsession with the personalities and "character" of the candidates.

This emphasis on personalities in American politics is the political version of the celebrity worship central to our com- mercial television culture. The 1989 book "The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives," describes the creation of media celebrities as a deliberate "social technology," which has "literally invaded and transformed the body politic, body social, and body moral of this society." In effect, media celebrities constitute the many faces of George Orwell’s "Big Brother."

Contrary to the celebrity pundits, whose principal function is to lull the elec- torate into thinking they live in an actual democracy, environmentalists know that there are serious issues that are not being addressed in our politics in any more than a superficial way. We also know that issues like global climate change, disappearing forests and groundwater, air and water pollution, species extinction, and the ubiquitous pre- sence of poisons and synthetic chemicals throughout the entire planetary ecosystem, directly result from the proliferation of a consumer-oriented system we call "the American way of life."

At the core of the appeal of the "American way" are values that seem intrinsically positive. Hence its infectious popularity. These values include individual freedom and mobility; an optimistic belief in "progress" and the promise of technology and science; a "can do" attitude toward any challenges; and a quasi-religious faith in the limitless abundance of nature and in the blessings of wealth. The product of the inter- face of Enlightenment philosophy with the practical experience of Europeans settling an unspoiled wilderness, these values worked for two centuries to help Americans both "conquer" the continent, and put a positive spin on the darker aspects of this conquest.

The idea of the American way was also important as an organizing principle in establishing a national identity. In his classic 1960 study of propaganda, French sociologist Jacques Ellul argued that the biggest problem facing the US in the late 1700s was "to unify a disparate population" of "diverse traditions and tendencies." The solution, according to Ellul, "was psychological standardization — that is, simply to use a way of life as the basis of unification and as an instrument of propaganda."

This adherence to a common ideal also had an economic dimension, especially with the advent of the Industrial Age. "Mass production requires mass consumption," Ellul continued. "One therefore needs fundamental psychological unity on which advertising can play with certainty when manipulating public opinion. And in order for public opinion to respond, it must be convinced of the excellence of all that is ‘American.’ Thus conformity of life and conformity of thought are indissolubly linked."

Four decades after Ellul wrote this, in our present era of "niche marketing" and globalization, his analysis seems at first glance a bit simplistic. That is, until you consider how ever-larger corporations have come to dominate American life and culture, replacing individual family-owned busi- nesses with depressingly uniform chain stores and restaurants, to the point where cities and suburbs all over the country are virtually indistinguishable from each other. This process is sometimes called the Walmartization of America, or the McDonaldization of the world.

Throughout the past century, there has been a concerted effort by the public relations industry, working in the service of business interests, to change the self-image of Americans from "citizens" to "consumers." The success of this effort cannot be under- estimated. With 6 percent of the world’s population, Americans account for 25 percent of the annual consumption of the world’s resources. The American consumer, carrying a nearly $300 billion annual trade deficit, is the engine that drives the global economy. American consumer spending is credited with single-handedly lifting the world out of its most recent economic recession.

Of course all this consumption has its costs. For one thing, we have the highest rate of obesity on the planet; and in the developed world, the lowest rate of personal savings. US credit card debt is at a record high; and so are the numbers of personal bankruptcies. To fuel our consuming habits, American workers spend more hours on the job than the workers of any other industrial nation—an average 135 more hours annually than we worked two decades ago. And here in the land that created the concept of "planned obsoles- cence," we naturally generate more garbage than any other nation, from the household waste that clogs our landfills to the coal waste that fills our streams.

If this were simply a case of yet another imperial civilization in the late stages of decadence and collapse, it wouldn’t be so worrisome. History is replete with examples of societies who consumed themselves out of existence. But today, when technology has united the globe to a degree unprecedented in human history, and the US is the world’s dominant military, economic and cultural power, the American way of life is our most important export. As a character in a film by German director Wim Wenders put it, America "colonized our subconscious."

The unsustainable economic model we are exporting contains the seeds of tragedy when applied in a regional context, but spread out to every corner of a vastly over-

populated world, reaches critical propor- tions. This is a fact long recognized by many of the world’s leading scientists, who in 1992 published a "Warning to Humanity," whose signatories included a majority of living Nobel laureates. The statement warned, "We are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits. Current economic practices that damage the environment, in both developed and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair."

In the eight years since that warning was issued, virtually none of the recommen- dations the scientists made to correct huma- nity’s course has been implemented.

For quite distinct reasons, it is unlikely that either of the major party candidates in the 2000 US presidential campaign will con- centrate on the environment. They would both like to evade their environmental records — one because he doesn’t want to offend his corporate donors, the other because of his long association with polluters.

That will suit the mass media just fine. They know that a happy viewer is the most lucrative target of their advertisers, so they don’t want to disturb anybody with bad news. They prefer melodrama to reality, in which case they’ll concentrate on the candi- dates’ human qualities. Is one not serious enough? Is the other too serious? Human conflict—now that’s entertainment!

Pass the popcorn.